Going into a big store these days can be a bit overwhelming, especially to those of us who started out in life in a small town where the stores were mostly small Mom and Pop operations.
In large stores, like super centers, just the sheer variety and volume of all the items being sold is amazing. One can find groceries, electronics of all kinds, clothing, household supplies, photography and printing, prescriptions, snack bars, bank outlets, optometrists, automotive departments, so many things! The other day, walking down the grocery aisle looking for my Cheerios and Raisin Bran, I began noticing all the brands and varieties of breakfast cereals. In my early life, we had Cheerios and Kellogg's Raisin Bran, and Post Toasties and Post Raisin Bran, and Puffed Wheat and Puffed Rice and Shredded Wheat Biscuits. Now I see all kinds of different varieties and flavors of Cheerios, about 10 different brands of Raisin Bran, dozens of kinds of children's sugary cereals, shelves and shelves of different brands.
But right now I'm thinking of all the items that are sold today which we never used to see at all in stores.
As the years have passed, and new things are invented and marketed, some have caught on so vigorously that they are regarded as near necessities today. For example, a car used to be something of a luxury. Before the Model T Ford appeared, an automobile was a novel, luxury item for wealthy people. Today, who would want to live without a car? Only a few people, I think. Even teenagers feel that they need cars. It was back about 1950, as I recall, that some of the high school boys at Pea Ridge began to own cars. Most of their cars back then were 10-year-old Chevys and Fords. New cars were rare, even for adults. My family got our first really new car in 1956. Before that, our "new" cars had been of the "new to us" variety; they weren't really new.
When I was very young, most people had home radios, almost always battery-powered. Some of us had a car battery to run our radio, but the hardware stores back then also offered Ray-O-Vac batteries especially for home radios. Most of us didn't have electricity in our homes until about 1945. Shortly after World War II, television had been invented and was developed to the point that families began purchasing home TVs. My family got our first TV in 1953, and a year later we got our first home telephone. We had never had one of the old party line phones. In the early 1950s Mr. Floyd Wilson developed the Pea Ridge Telephone Co., and began running lines to farms around the community. So we started out with a dial telephone. With that "advanced" system, we could dial "long distance" without having to go through a central operator.
It was amazing how quickly TV and telephones caught on. They quickly went from novelties and luxuries to being near necessities for home life. Who, today, would want to do without a TV or to live with no phone? Sometimes I think of all the thousands of years during which human beings lived without motor cars, without radio, without TV, without phones, and never had a thought that they might need any of those things! But we, today, can hardly imagine living without them. In the long ago, even kings and queens and the fabulously wealthy people who lived in palatial houses never had electronics, never had motor cars, never had phones, and yet they enjoyed luxurious lives.
We keep coming up with new things to spend money for, and many of the novel new things seem to turn into necessities, or at least things we hate to do without. Back about 1996, 20 years ago, we noticed that some of our friends were getting mobile phones, car phones. Those were large, bulky units with power cords which plugged into the car's cigarette lighter. Previous to that, car phones were mainly for use by law enforcement officers. We thought that maybe it would be good to have one in case we had car trouble and got stranded out on the road. We might need to call for help. Then we discovered that we could receive calls from other people, and we could even call regular people. Soon, cell phones were invented, with cameras. We wondered at first why in the world would we ever need a camera on our phone? Well, those really caught on. Soon, there were smart phones, and everybody almost had to have one. Otherwise, how would we keep up with our Facebook pages, or our friends' posts, and how would we Google the stuff we needed to know about, and how would we turn off the lights in our house that we forgot when we left home this morning?
Back about a hundred years ago, we got moving pictures in theaters, then we got air conditioning in movie theaters and in motels, and eventually even in homes. Then, in the 1980s, "everybody" started needing a home computer. We have so many things to spend money on, things that we can hardly imagine living without, even though our ancestors would probably have wondered why would anybody ever need all these strange new-fangled gadgets?
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Editor's note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge and an award-winning columnist, is vice president of Pea Ridge Historical Society. The opinions expressed are those of the author. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.
Editorial on 10/12/2016